Renee Swindle is author of Shake Down the Stars, a novel I loved so much I immediately friended her on Facebook and asked if I could interview her.

I’m not the only one who loved it. RT Book Reviews said “This novel is a true gem. Beautifully written, it’s full of emotional impact that touches the heart without weighing the reader down. Themes of love, loss and addiction will reach into the soul.”

And author Elizabeth Gilbert recently recommended it on her Facebook page.

Renee and I had a great email chat and I found it very inspiring that after writing two novels that didn’t sell (after selling her first) she used those experiences to find her voice and work on the novel she was meant to write. I hope you are inspired too!

[pullquote]Looking back, I wrote those two novels while doing my best to sound and write like anyone except me. I’m not sure who I was trying to be—Toni Morrison? Alice Walker? Stephen King?! But writing those two books helped me discover my voice—or come back to my voice, depending on how you look at it. [/pullquote]

Shake Down the Stars is about a parent’s worst nightmare happening—the death of a child. Yet, in part because the death happens 5 years before the novel begins, you manage to write very humorously and yet still poignantly about a grieving woman. How did you pull that off?!

I don’t know! LOL! I think it helped—immensely—that the daughter’s death occurred five years before the start of the novel. In the first draft, the daughter had only passed away the year before, so my idea to incorporate humorous moments wasn’t working at all. By starting the novel at a later point in time, the story became more about discovering how the narrator, Piper, would ever find joy again. It became more about how she was dealing with loss, which freed me to use lighter and funnier moments. It did take a few drafts, though, to get the balance just write. Some drafts were too dark and heavy; some were too funny and lighthearted. At any rate, I absolutely love that readers have said they both laughed and cried while reading it. That’s exactly what I was aiming for.

When I started Weight Watchers, I made a list of all the great advantages to losing weight. I wrote it on the notes function on my phone. I’d pull out my phone and look at the list a lot those first few months. I added to it occasionally as I thought of something new. It was helpful to have a reminder of why I was making the choices I was making. And it made dieting less about what I was denying myself and more about what I was giving myself.

I did the same when I started working full-time again. I could pull that list out and review it those first couple of weeks when I really missed working at home in my jammies with my kitty snoring softly nearby. “Remember Carleen,” my list said, “you’re not just giving up all that time, you’re getting to learn new things and have steady income and health benefits, etc.”

Recently, I made a list of the reasons it’s important to me to finish my next novel.

…in the grass, at the desk, on the path, everywhere! Linda Adams left a great comment about writing in little chunks of time on Barbara O’Neal’s post about her rules for writing. I was replying there but my reply grew so long and I have a post due, so I’m moving my reply here.

I too am back at work full-time and find that I don’t have large blocks of time (when I’m not exhausted) to write or exercise or garden or read. However, I am figuring out I do have many small bits of time that I can use. As I written here before I lost weight over a year ago and in my efforts to keep it off, I am packing my lunch and grazing on it over a few hours rather than eating it all at once. It’s working.

I usually bus in and get off a few stops early so I can get in a 10-minute walk before work. Then I take a 10- or 20-minute walk (or yoga break) at lunch and a 10- or 20-minute walk on the way home and voila! Exercise is done.

Just this week, I started doing the same with writing. I’ve always been someone who thought I needed several hours at once to get any writing done, but now I’m finding that I can apply the same grazing philosophy (10 or 20 minutes in the morning and at lunch, etc.) and I can slowly but surely get some work done.

Grazing is working for me with diet, exercise (and weeding my garden). I hope it works for writing too.

My writing workshop students and I were having a lively discussion recently about the pros and cons of using real life in our work. Half of the class is trying to figure out if they want to tell their stories via memoir or novel. One woman had turned in pages for critique about her relationship with her adult daughter. It was good writing—the beginnings of something I could see going either into memoir or fiction.

One of the considerations I wanted to broach for my students was the ethics involved in using real life. Writers will inevitably involve other people in our work. But what’s right and fair when we tell “our” stories? I wanted to caution this new writer that maybe she was stepping too far over the line. (The line that like the judge said about porn no one can say where it is, but we know it when we see it.) I can’t draw the line for her. There’s not a clear-cut rule. Legally, she was probably safe. (A couple of great overviews about libel, defamation and invasion of privacy here and here.) But I felt like the family member she was writing about, with whom she already has a difficult relationship, may not enjoy seeing all that information go public. I wanted her to know that while telling the truth is an admirable goal for a writer, there might be consequences from it that she may not like.

A question writers need to ask ourselves: Is good writing worth causing a rift with loved ones?[Read more…]

Tomorrow, I go back to full-time employment. I got a new job I’m very psyched about. I’m also teaching a writing workshop on Saturdays for eight weeks. So I’ll be busy, and I need to write. I’m a little concerned about getting back in the habit of using my time wisely (no more Real Housewives for me!), but because I wrote my first novel while working full-time I know something important: it’s not really how much time we have, it’s what we do with it. I wasted a lot of time these last few years. Happily. Good on me. It’s my time and I got to spend it napping, reading, daydreaming, watching basketball and goofing around on the Internet. But I won’t have the luxury of goofing off anymore (Jezebel and Gawker be gone!), which is okay.

I’ve been thinking about how to plan my time better and got some good advice from a few writer pals, which I decided to share here. There seem to be at least two schools of thought about how to motivate yourself (with regards to doing anything, including exercise). One relies on getting yourself in the mood and the other says, mood schmood–just do it.

Rise and Write

Lisa Brackmann, author of Rock Paper Tiger, says: “Having done this for a number of years — setting a schedule was the most helpful thing for me. A schedule and a rough goal per session.”

Eisa Ulen Richardson, author of Crystelle Mourning says: “My advice is to get up early and write before you do anything else. No email, no online bill pay, no CNN or NPR. Just rise and write – every morning.”

“I’m fortunate in that I work from home so I can divide my time fairly easily and still stay on top of work, personal and author email. (Assuming of course I give up sleep and social life… I’m joking. Sort of.) The creative process of writing means that sometimes I get a brilliant idea to finish a chapter at two p.m., right when a conference call for work is scheduled. It’s difficult to switch my brain from free-flowing fictional worlds to how I’m going to hire twelve software developers in New Jersey. I keep two separate old school spiral notebooks at the ready. One for my work ideas and one for my writing breakthroughs. I’m a bit anal when it comes to scheduling. My life is color coded. Everything pertaining to writing is in purple and filed on one side of the room, everything pertaining to [my job] is in green and on the other side. And ne’er the twain shall meet…”

Drink the Kool-Aid

On the other side is the school of thought which says psych yourself up to keep motivated. Not necessarily that you need the muse to write, but it’s sure easier to get going when you feel enthusiastic about your work.

Kiini Ibura Salaam, author of Ancient, Ancient and winner of the 2012 James Tiptree Jr. Award for sci-fi and fantasy that explores or expands gender roles, wrote something on her Facebook page about “the Kool-Aid effect” that really struck me and I asked her for permission to quote it here.[Read more…]

My protagonist in the manuscript I’m just about ready to send to my agent is into manicures. The rest of the women in her family are great beauties and she believes she’s plain. The one feature she takes pride in is her hands. Like her, I get complimented on my hands, but I don’t share the same feelings about my looks and my hands (just for the record).

When I was younger (junior high into my twenties) I kept my nails long and polished. But somewhere along the way I got bored with the upkeep, and over the years I grew to hate long nails. Every now and then, like before a book signing or a vacation, I’d polish my fingernails or get a manicure (always in a white or pale pink French-type look).

But since Rae is into painting her nails, I’ve been painting my nails. I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of having little pops of color at the end of my fingertips. Right now they are a shimmering fuchsia. Up next is a Michelle Obama-inspired blue-gray called “Chic.” And I am totally going to do a keyboard manicure one day.

I wish I could call it method writing, but it’s not that intentional. I didn’t paint my nails to get a more accurate sense of how to describe it in my book (though that definitely happened). Just somehow along the way I’ve started to exhibit this aspect of her character. I did this with characters in my other novels too (especially becoming more of a gardener as I wrote about gardening).

I know I’m creating these characters and I know they are coming from parts of me that already exist, but it also feels like I get influenced by them and learn from them. Not only do my characters evolve as I write them, but I do as well. I’ve heard lots of stories of actors getting caught up in their roles. It seems writers can too. Thank goodness I don’t write about serial killer or vampires!

What about you? Do you ever find yourself acting like your characters?

I got an e-reader from Santa. The first book I read on it was Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott. At one point she talks about giving advice to someone to act as if they had a belief in a higher power. That phrase “act as if” is big in 12 Step circles. Not feeling like being sober right now? Act like you are–go to a meeting, call your sponsor, etc.

Studies back up the idea that if you want a quality, you should act as if you already have it. Smiling before you feel happy can make you feel happy. Acting like you’re in love with someone could very well make you fall in love him or her (explaining countless on-set romances).

“If you are having trouble with getting started on a project, be it cleaning out the closet or finishing a major presentation for work, act as if you are truly interested in the task at hand. Make the behavioral choice to force yourself to spend ‘just a few minutes’ on the project that you have been avoiding. It is likely that simply getting going in this way will give you the push that you need to spend more time getting things done.”

Which helps explain why Barbara O’Neal’s 20-minute win is so effective. Besides combating procrastination, how might writers benefit from acting as if? In “2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love” Rachel Aaron says she has more productive, more enjoyable writing days when she takes five minutes to jot down notes about what she plans to write about that day. Not only to give her a brain an outline to follow but to get her enthusiasm going. To make her feel excited about writing. “Every day…I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it,” she writes.

That’s not quite acting as if. But could smiling while you write help you feel more enthused about that day’s work? Could acting like you love your work help you get in touch with what you do really love about it? [Read more…]

Once upon a time I was a fool for love. Or just a fool. Now I’m writing about a woman who is in a relationship with the wrong man. He’s not a good guy, but my protagonist can’t see that.

I’ve been writing around my own experience doing many of the same things she does because….

This novel isn’t the story of me with that man and I don’t want to have to explain that a million times. People tend to assume what they read in a novel is true. I once had a woman argue with me at a reading that the main character in my first novel had to be me. I’d bet money someone out there believes J.K. Rowling really went to wizarding school.

But I’ve come to realize the deeper reason I’ve been avoiding my own experience is because it’s embarrassing, and isn’t much fun to revisit. Sure, over a few margaritas with friends I can poke fun at myself for some of the things that happened back then. But I don’t really want to go to the place where the pain is.

And that’s not going to cut it. For that woman at the reading had a point. While the protagonist in that novel wasn’t me, she was in fact a part of me. As are all the people in my stories. I’m not doing myself or my characters or my readers any favors when I try to deny or avoid that. [Read more…]

When I was writing the first draft of my first novel, I had big dreams. For one, I wanted it to be published in hardcover. I had published nonfiction in paperback and felt like I would finally be able to consider myself a “real” writer if I had a hardback. (It was 2001. Such ideas seemed to make sense back then. Now I know being published “only” in paperback is the writer’s equivalent of a first-world problem.) Also, I wanted a two-book deal, and I wanted the book to be optioned for a movie. Like I said, big dreams.

Over the next few years my dreams grew less grand. I stopped caring whether it came out in hardcover or paper and just wanted it published. Just this one novel. Forget a two-book deal. Then, as I got deeper into the thicket of rewrites, I stopped caring whether it got published at all. I just needed to make an agent’s cut, I figured. If I could do that, then, even if he or she couldn’t sell it, I’d know I was on the right track. By the last draft, I didn’t care if an agent ever read it. My only dream, my only goal, was to finish the damn thing.

Ironically (or maybe not so ironically, depending on your belief system), I got a lot of what I wanted. Two-book deal. Awards and great reviews. My first novel got optioned for a TV movie and even more amazingly, they actually made the TV movie.

But all that didn’t lead where I had hoped it would lead. My second novel didn’t do as well. The economy crashed. Technology changed. My editor got laid off. An editor at another house who wanted to buy my third novel based on a proposal got laid off. I wrote a partial draft of a sequel to my first novel and a treatment for a movie. Both almost happened, but didn’t. Friends shared similar sad tales. Every day it seemed like there was more bad publishing news. I started to suffer a crisis of faith. I felt like I had been led down at least two dead end paths. It was hard to keep any writing dream alive. Woe was me.

Then last year around this time I switched my focus a little, and went on Weight Watchers. I kept writing. In fact, after blogging a few times about writing through doubt, I got a deal with Agate Publishing to write a book on the subject. (Working title: The Not So Fearless Writer. If all goes well, look for it sometime next year.) I kept working on my novel-in-progress. But I also worked on getting my head and spirit right too. And it helped me see things in a new light. [Read more…]

Typically we hear about books being turned into movies. Occasionally, it happens the other way; a movie gets “novelized.” My friend Denene Millner recently turned the screenplay for the movie “Sparkle” into a book, and I asked her to share with Writer Unboxed what that experience was like. Following is our Q&A:

How did the project come to you?

My brilliant agent, Victoria Sanders, conjured it up after several conversations with me about my love for Whitney Houston and the impact she had on my development into a young woman, and a few talks with the brother of the original “Sparkle” producer, Howard Rosenman. I’d been considering doing a book of personal essays about Whitney, and Victoria and I were working on that piece when she had those initial talks. After a conversation or two with Howard, and my revelation that the original “Sparkle” was/is one of my all-time favorite movies and Whitney is one of my all-time favorite voices, it came to pass that Howard thought I would make a fine writer for the project of turning his story and Mara Brock Akil’s screenplay into a novel. So it was a stroke of genius on Victoria’s part, a stroke of luck on my part. The stars definitely aligned on this one.

Had you ever done a project like this before?

I had the great fortune of doing the novelization of “Dreamgirls,” the 2006 film starring Beyoncé, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson, whose performance won her an Academy Award. That, too, was serendipitous: the editor who wrangled the rights to the novelization was someone with whom I’d worked on a few other projects and when she was looking for a writer—someone who could turn out a solid, well-written story on a wicked two-week deadline—she turned to me. Like the “Sparkle” project, I was sent the screenplay, did research on the era, the original project and the characters, and then wrote the story. It really is an incredible process: I love taking stories and filling in the back-stories of the plots, the characters and those moments that you don’t necessarily see in the movie. It is an awesome collaborative process. [Read more…]

J.D. Mason is the author of several bestselling novels including, And on the Eighth Day She Rested, This Fire Down in My Soul, You Gotta Sin To Get Saved, and Somebody Pick Up My Pieces. J.D. has been nominated for The Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Awards in the African American Fiction and Best Contemporary Fiction categories. Her latest Beautiful, Dirty, Rich is the beginning of a new series about scandal, sex, intrigue and secrets in a small Texas town called Blink.

Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say:

Families torn apart by greed and duplicity, characters driven by blinding passion, toe-curling sex, and a moral compass that goes with the flow: Mason (One Day I Saw a Black King) doesn’t disappoint with this soap opera yarn of an everywoman wrongfully convicted of murder 26 years earlier. Now, with a $20 million inheritance in the bank, Desi Green wants to tell the truth about the sensational Blink, Tex., murder case that left Julian Gatewood dead and Desi’s mother, Ida, Gatewood’s lover, loaded. “All anybody thinks is that she was a home wrecker, and he was a cheat who had the misfortune of getting shot for his troubles.” But Desi knows, “There’s so much more,” including a murderous judge, a slave-trader cop, and bribes to convict Desi of killing Gatewood, “that beautiful, dirty, rich bastard” whom Desi and Ida adored. Desi and conniving pal Lonnie go up against Gatewood’s scion Jordan—a J.R. Ewing for the 21st century—and addled widow Olivia to expose family secrets and find the real killer. Mason’s characters create an addictive drama with universal themes of laying claim to family—and to truth.

I’m delighted to share this Q&A with J.D. about creating compelling characters and stories using “a true and honest and fearless assessment of self.”

In Beautiful, Dirty, Rich, you really keep the plot clipping along. When you revise, what kind of stuff do you cut to keep the manuscript lean and mean?

Most of my manuscripts start out pretty lean, and I end up having to add content in order to make them decent sized novels. My writing mantra is “get it out of my head and down on paper and fill in the blanks as time goes on” and that’s usually how it comes together. Besides that, I have a short attention span and the content has to hold my interest before I can feel comfortable that it’s holding my reader’s interest. The devil’s in the details, sure enough, but I try to be conservative in how I approach those details so as not to overwhelm the audience. My stories can get pretty complicated and I get character happy, and something’s got to give, so I try not to bog the story down with more than it needs.

Your books are plot-generated, yet you draw characters really well. You have a pretty big cast of characters and you succinctly describe them. We get just enough history and description to know who they are. How do you do that?

Actually, I’ve always thought of myself as more of a character-driven writer. My plotting skills are not my strong suit, so through the years, I’ve learned to pay more attention to them and really work hard at fleshing out the story. Most of my earlier books focused on the characters who I depended on to tell the story, and it worked. I love getting inside my characters’ heads and I’ve found that all it takes is a thought or a single action from a character that helps give readers an idea of who that person is. It really is the subtle things that tell the truth about an individual, and that applies not only to fictional characters, but to real people as well. [Read more…]

I recently exchanged my manuscript with a writer friend who also had a novel she wanted me to read. We read and edited on paper (we’re old-school that way), so I now have 300+ pages with notes, plus an “editor’s letter” she gave me summarizing her comments.

I also just wrapped a big freelance project (a 24-page special section for a trade magazine) for which I served as content editor. This booklet was reviewed by five people who all provided comments via Microsoft Word’s track changes function on different versions of each article. Part of my job was to reconcile all the different files with their different comments and questions into final documents.

Is it any wonder I’ve got editing on the brain?

Now that the monster freelance job is out the door (and I have a little window before I begin the next one), it’s time to tackle these edits. If, like me, you get a little light-headed at all the work you have to do after you’ve received a critique letter and edits, these suggestions might help.

Read the letter, then wait. If you get an editor’s letter or notes from a beta reader, it may be a good idea not to react right away. Give yourself a day, then reread it. I find that even when I’ve asked for notes and even if the notes support how I was feeling about the manuscript, I still feel a little pang at seeing the problems spelled out in black and white by somebody else. Waiting before I wade in to the work gives me a chance to have an initial “I-suck” reaction. With a little time I can then see the comments more clearly. Yay! I only partially suck.